In a busy healthcare environment, such as a hospital, clinicians roam frequently among patients, floors and buildings. Each time a clinician reaches a new location, she may require access to patient information or other medical data maintained by the facility (or elsewhere). That data may be accessed via a local, typically shared workstation, or via a handheld wireless device, such as a “smart phone” or tablet capable of hosting applications and establishing telecommunications, Internet and/or local intranet connections.
In particular, medical institutions from hospitals to physician practice groups to testing centers maintain diverse electronic medical records (EMR) systems, which collectively form the healthcare information backbone. EMR systems allow clinicians access to medical information maintained in various back-end systems. The typical workflow when a physician interacts with a patient involves first logging onto the computer system, then launching and logging into one or more EMR applications, selecting the right patient record, verifying that the record matches the patient, reviewing results (often from different sources), checking up on medical references, entering orders or prescriptions (e.g., using computerized physician order entry (CPOE) applications and ePrescribing), and/or charting patient progress. All of these activities may involve the same patient but different applications, and in some cases multiple separate applications for a single patient-specific activity.
Moreover, healthcare records are protected by strict privacy laws (such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA), regulatory regimes, and institutional access policies. Accordingly, when a clinician moves from place to place, he may be required to log on to a new terminal or device, and because of data-access restrictions, the log-on procedure may involve cumbersome and/or multiple authentication modalities.
Thus, in a healthcare environment, where people move about frequently, a busy clinician may face delays as she moves from node to node. Even if the log-on procedure is automated and the clinician need not re-authenticate, restoring a previous session—i.e., re-launching applications, querying databases for previously requested patient data, etc.—can be time-consuming. Indeed, stringent security requirements may require re-authentication using a stronger modality even at the same node. For example, a properly authenticated user may need to re-authenticate when issuing an electronic prescription for a controlled substance, and to satisfy regulatory requirements that re-authentication may involve a “strong” modality such as a fingerprint or vein scan.